Episode 3: Be Ready for Any Health Situation by Improving Interactions with the Healthcare System
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the podcast episode.
Subscribe to the Treat Us Right Podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Welcome to the Treat Us Right Podcast. I am your host, David S. Williams, Founder and CEO of Karen Health Services. At Karen Health Services, we help you own, store, generate, access, and share your personal and family health information. Karen makes it easy for you to chart health experience for you and your family so you can Be Ready for any healthcare situation. Improve your health interactions with doctors. Get better treatments, better care, and better health.
Be Ready with Karen. Visit us at yeskaren.com.
This is episode 3 of the Treat Us Right podcast and we’re coming to you from the Karen Health Home HQ in Los Angeles, California.
In our last episode, we reviewed how COVID-19 has disproportionately led to more deaths of African Americans in the US and what we can do to overcome these disparities. We discussed the Karen Health recommended best practices for managing personal and family health information. To review, the Karen Health “Be Ready” recommendations are:
1. Request a digital copy of your health records from your doctors.
a. Your health data belongs to you by law. And they have to give it to you for FREE.
2. Save Your Family Health Information in One Place
a. Use a HIPAA compliant cloud service to consolidate health information for each family member. When you have the information, you can see what works and what doesn’t and you control the distribution of data—reducing your dependence on the healthcare system for your data.
3. Chart Your Health Experience (Daily or Weekly)
a. Only you can describe what you’re feeling. Capture it. This is the information doctors need to give you customized, personalized care and it doesn’t exist in electronic medical records.
4. Share Your Health Experience with Family and Care Team
a. Family want to be kept updated on health status, especially when aging parents are involved between siblings.
b. Having access to health data for yourself and family members means you can share it with care professionals in any health situation—whether it’s an emergency or a normal doctor visit. Sharing health data improves interactions with providers and gives them the data they need to provide optimal treatments for you and your loved ones.
This last point, is where we want to focus in this episode. Our Interactions with the healthcare system. In a COVID-19 world, having ready access to complete health information is the clear answer to getting the best care. It is clear that our new normal will include being more mindful of our health—not just for ourselves but also for those most vulnerable like our aging parents, special needs children, those with pre-existing conditions, and our fellow citizens impacted by the social determinants of health.
When you are with your doctor on a typical visit, she asks you questions about how you’re feeling, if anything of note has happened since your last visit, and if you have any questions based on how you’re feeling. This interaction, a verbal conversation, is how the doctor collects data that is relevant to their treatment planning. It is information only you can give them.
But what if you forget something important in that moment? What if you had a one-time migraine or other event that you just didn’t remember? What if you run out of time with your doctor? Any unintended omission of relevant information could negatively impact what the doctor recommends for you for treatment. The way healthcare is delivered today outside of hospitals, your doctor’s treatment plan is typically limited by your memory in the moment and any past data that they have in your medical record. Maybe you haven’t seen your doctor in six months, or a year. Maybe this is your first time meeting a new doctor or specialist. Your treatment will be as good as your memory. We can do better.
Now let’s think about your job. You have a big presentation meeting coming up. Your preparation will be impeccable. You will have a speech ready with your key points teed up. You will have a slide deck with charts and graphs to visualize your key points. And you will have data that backs up every point with evidence.
You will walk into the room ready. You’ll have your text, your media, and your data ready to go so you make the best impression, have the most influence, and get the results you deserve.
Now let’s compare that approach to what you did prior to your last doctor visit. Did you prepare for that meeting with the same focus? Or did you just wing it? Did you have a visual ready for your doctor so they could see what’s been happening with you since your last visit? Did you have data that would serve as evidence to what you’re feeling?
Your economic viability and personal health are the two most important factors in living your best life. But when you visit your doctor, you don’t prepare like you do at your job, do you? At your work presentation you had text, media, and data. You were tight. At your doctor visit, you’re only having a verbal exchange of information. What if you could be ready for your doctor visit with the same level of detail without having to spend the same time intensity in preparation?
Your doctor spends maybe five minutes with you. Let’s max out those minutes for YOUR benefit. Let’s help them help us.
In order for our healthcare teams to treat us right, we have to give them the information that they can’t get from electronic medical records systems, lab tests or other sources. We have to fill in these critical information gaps with our own experience in order to get the best care. Because our ongoing health experience is more important than any point-in-time test the doctor can run. Our experience shows the doctors what is happening. It is the greatest factor in deciding paths to take in treatment. This is true in an emergency just as much as a regular doctor visit.
To bring this situation to life, I want to share a very personal story of how being ready helped my family in a moment of crisis. While this story occurred prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many families I’ve spoken to have wished they were ready like this.
This is a story of my son, David Solomon Williams IV and an episode related to his experience with severe autism.
On November 1, 2019, my son had a severe grand mal seizure. He had never had a seizure before. While his autism has many severe symptoms and he’s still non-verbal and not fully toilet-trained at 15 years old, he has always been physically able and never had any additional neurological events. My wife and I were waking him up for school when we found him on the floor, non-responsive, convulsing, foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling. It was scary. The moments are emblazoned in my mind.
We immediately got him in a stable position without restraining him (we know how to deal with seizures because we knew some children with autism have them) and made sure he didn’t have anything in his mouth. We called 911 and after a couple minutes, he began to calm. He was still unresponsive for another few minutes, but at least his convulsions had subsided. My 12-year old daughter witnessed the tail end and kept asking her brother if he was OK. She was so concerned and scared. We had to comfort her, too.
By the time the paramedics arrived in about 10 minutes, David was responsive. He was still foggy and lying on the floor but he at least responded to our voices. There was relief in that. We called our nanny to come in to take care of our daughter so she could stay home from school. We grabbed some of David’s school activities in his backpack and headed to the hospital.
In the Emergency Room we briefed the attending physician and the nurse as we waited for a room. The impact of those moments and the next hour we were there is where you will see the inspiration. You see, we use Karen to manage my son’s heath and care. We walked into this situation with a full two months of symptom and vitals data on our mobile phones that we were able to share with the care team. We had his full medication and supplement list in the palm of our hands including changes in meds over the last two months. We had prior blood work results to use as comparison so they could see what was normal for HIM, not just what was in the normal range for a general person.
While in the ER, I added an Event Report into the app about the Seizure, its Severe level of severity, how long it lasted, the fact that we’re unsure of what the trigger is, that it resulted in an ER visit and all of the detail I could think of in the Notes section. None of that detail will ever be lost. In fact, I had taken some video when he was calm and still on the floor in case doctors needed to see what he looked like coming out of the seizure. I added that into David’s Karen journal as well.
We were in the ER for a few hours. When we received David’s labs back and all were either normal or not unexpectedly out of range, we were discharged. David was a trooper in this experience. He did work on his keyboard spelling out words and writing short sentences. He listened to his favorite music. He smiled at the nurses (that’s not autism, that’s teenage boy). He was able to walk around the area without assistance. He let us know he was ready to leave—and right after that, he actually laid down to sleep until the moment we left.
Upon discharge we were given his lab results, discharge plan, and seizure education information—all on paper. This was solid information, but paper delivery is antiquated and risky because things get lost in these kinds of stressful situations. When we got home I immediately scanned the papers on my phone and added them into David’s journal on the Karen app. So now we have his most current lab results right after a seizure to compare with multiple results from normal times.
That’s when we began calling David’s doctors to let them know what happened. Our conversations not only described the incident, but we shared David’s new lab results with previous ones we had. This data made the conversation even richer. We then shared his med list and symptom and vitals that we had tracked over the two months prior to the seizure. Our main doctor was just amazed at how much we knew (and it only took us about 2 minutes a day to update his info. 2 minutes!). We determined that it may have been one of David’s medications at a high dose that triggered the seizure, so we have discontinued that medication. Since last Friday, we have been observing David around the clock and at school (we kept him home for a few days, of course). He has shown no indication of another seizure, a fact for which we are extremely grateful.
This experience has inspired me even more to make Karen a household brand for personal and family healthcare. I know that my family is not normal, but imagine if we were. Imagine if you or your loved one had a health emergency. You would have immediate access to information that could inform doctors who have never seen you or your loved one before. They could get real-time access to your most recent health experience to further inform their treatment decisions. And then you would have the information from that experience to share with all of your other care team members. You’d have every data point accessible, comparable, and actionable when needed. In the future I see, this is the norm, not the exception. Your health information used in real-time to make the best care decisions. With Karen you and your loved ones can have good interactions with the healthcare system and get optimal care, even in the worst situations.
Now I want to help you Be Ready like we were for any health situation.
1. Join Karen FREE at www.yeskaren.com and Upload Health Files
From your computer, go to yeskaren.com and sign up. It’s free. Once you join, you can immediately drag and drop health files that you have stored on your hard drive to your HIPAA-compliant Karen Health Journal.
2. Download the Karen Mobile App to Access Anywhere, Anytime
Next, download the Karen mobile app. From your mobile device, go to www.yeskaren.com/download. Then tap the badge that takes you to the App Store or Google Play depending on your device. Download the app and log in with the same username and password you used when you created your account on the yeskaren.com website. With the Karen mobile app, you will have access to your health files anywhere, anytime.
3. Create Health Journals for Each Family Member
You can also create Karen Health Journals for each family member to save their information. Look for the Welcome email once you join. It has links to step-by-step instructions on how to set up journals and add information for each family member and many of our key features. And once again, Karen Health is free.
By joining Karen and adding health files to your secure Health Journal, you’re taking a major step in controlling your personal and family health information. You will Be Ready for any health situation. The time is now.
Thank you for listening to the Treat Us Right podcast, brought to you by Karen Health. To learn more about Karen, visit us at www.yeskaren.com. Join us next time as we explore more ways we can help the healthcare system Treat Us Right in our times of need—now with COVID-19 and beyond. Take care.